I’ve just had to ‘postpone’ reading Behave by Robert Sapolsky as its genuinely too hard for me – I was kind of expecting an intellectually challenging romp through neuroscience and psychology for the layman, not degree level stuff!   So thats on hold.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous I’m now halfway through Life by Keith Richards – absolutely hilarious plus loads of easter eggs if you are a blues guitar nerd. Can’t belive  I never read it before.

I always think that Lovecraft’s actual writing is a bit heavy-handed for me, but a lot of the writers who he inspired use that background much better

Lovecraft had views that aren’t so acceptable these days, and his style of writing is a bit stiff, but as someone once said, the past is a different country, they do things different there. I haven’t read any of his works for years, but I was a bit disappointed when Guillermo del Toro decided to put production of ‘At The Mountains Of Madness’ on the back burner.

I’m also reading an Adrian Tchaikovsky, Doors of Eden. About parallel evolution and crossovers between different Earths where life evolved differently. Very good.

Currently reading one of his ‘Children of Time’, I’m about halfway through. Two following books, ‘Children of Ruin’, and ‘Children of Memory’.

Drawing an awful lot from David Brin’s Uplift books, who gets properly name-checked as well. The Uplifting, using a nanovirus, was supposed to rapidly ‘uplift’ animals to sentience, in this case primates on an embargoed Earth-adjacent planet, to save them from human interference while human civilisation goes to shit and the remaining humans head for other star systems.

Trouble is, the planet only had invertebrates, no primates. Spiders and ants, Portia spiders, particularly, tiny jumping spiders, which are a lot smarter than they have any right to be…

Very engaging book, the spiders are particularly well drawn as characters. And I love jumping spiders!

I haven’t read any of his works for years, but I was a bit disappointed when Guillermo del Toro decided to put production of ‘At The Mountains Of Madness’ on the back burner.

The Colo(u)r Out of Space film is actually pretty good – Nicolas Cage, schlocky B movie stuff.

Currently reading one of his ‘Children of Time’, I’m about halfway through.

Someone bought this for me, and given the heft I expected ‘hard’ scifi – and it is kinda ‘hard’ I guess? But as you say, really engaging despite the robustness of the ideas (and the reliance on huge spiders), incredibly readable. Reminds me to add the sequels to my Amazon watchlist. Will also check out Doors of Eden.

Really goes to show that sci-fi is doing really well at the moment. I love the older 60s/70s scifi – Larry Niven, Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Frederik Pohl, your man with the leprosy in the fantasy world (Thomas Covenant?), and absolutely devoured them all when I was younger. Going back to them now though a lot of them really are more about the ideas than the writing; some of Heinlein’s stuff is unreadable tedium for about 300 pages, Niven was only ever any good with co-authors (rereading the original Ringworld I was struck by how boring it is – it takes 3/4 of the book before they hit the Ringworld!), and so on. They were such good ideas, but the writing often didn’t do them justice. I remember reading a “meteor is hitting the Earth” book (possibly Rendezvous with Rama, although I remember it being more Niven-y) about 30 years ago that talked about using gene editing to develop a corn variant that produced biodegradable plastic rather than edible food – and now we’re actually approaching a point where these ideas are coming to fruition.

Whereas today’s sci fi has really gripping ideas (Mielville, Tchaikovsky, Reynolds, all the rest) AND the writing to really keep you engaged and deliver the narrative that the ideas deserve.

I really loved “Children of Time”, thought the second one was ok, but far from fantastic like the first. I need to re-read the first two to know the characters for the third, fine if you can read them back to back but not after a year. So rarely hear anyone talk about the uplift novels, I didn’t realise he name checked Brin (ahh the ship name).

Just read his City of Last Chances, and though I enjoyed it, I didn’t engage with the characters like I would with Abercrombie or Miéville book.

Currently struggling to find anything interesting, so am re-reading some of my older audible stuff (Scalzi and more Tchaikovsky)

I’m reading Saevrus Corax Deals With The Dead by KJ Parker, pretty much by mistake, it was cheap on amazon. I’d forgotten that I read KJ Parker’s 16 Ways To Defend A Walled City and found it pretty annoying. And this one’s annoying too. But good fun, loads of stuff gets called Pratchettey but actually this comes close at time, usually people fixate on the throwaway jokes but not so much on the wider wordplay and Parker definitely nails a lot of that.

But at the same time it’s annoying, everywhere the main character goes in the world they bump into an old friend or relative or archnemesis, sometimes the same one several times, as if there’s only about 20 people in this entire fantasy world, everyone else barely exists. And it’s just constant “we are doomed… unless the exact right thing happens at the exact right time” which of course it does every time. But still, quite enjoying it and glad I picked it up by mistake. it’s definitely a Romp or possibly a Caper and not a Serious Fantasy Novel but that’s OK.

CountZero
Full Member

Lovecraft had views that aren’t so acceptable these days

They weren’t very acceptable at the time, either, even fellow antisemites thought him tasteless and extreme. But it’s also got to be seen in perspective, he was completely out of his mind. He wasn’t just terrified of jews and black people and especially “interbreeding”, but also cracked windows, fish, brick walls with curves in, the cold, fat people, deserts but ALSO swamps and oceans and lakes, anything that’s normally sensibly sized but has become really big (such as large buildings), jelly, New England, drums (whether being played or not- but not the sound of drums, the drum itself), the colours grey and green (he had the exact same colourblindness as me, and found it absolutely disturbing that he couldn’t see some greens as other people saw them, his eyes lying to him!), dying old, dying young, not dying, acute angles, and any passage of time longer than about 20 years. (he loved anything he saw as reliable, respectable ancient history but couldn’t stand forgotten or ambiguous history) And even the racist thing was steeped in irrationality- he didn’t just have a problem with white people and black people “breeding”, he had a problem with any sort of mixing of colours, he couldn’t drink tea if he’d seen the milk being mixed in for instance. And he ended up marrying a jew of course.

And obviously all that madness went straight into the books, exaggerated to make his irrational phobias more reasonable, hence… “The nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh…was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults.” It’s all there, covered in the green jelly his mum made him eat. Which is what makes them memorable of course, most people have to invent the crazy stuff.

I’m making my way through the Penny Royal trilogy from Neal Asher. I’m on War Factory right now. They’re alright. I preferred the Cormac books. This trilogy makes the characters feel a little flat; I’m not really attached to any of them. Banks did a much better job giving the AIs and drones personality.

Just started reading ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’. First thoughts are that it’s f*****g brutal!

Lovecraft had views that aren’t so acceptable these days

I was going to write a one-liner, but erm, @Northwind seems to have beaten me to it…

Cooper and Szreter ‘After the Virus’, she’s an economist and he’s a history professor at Cambridge. Just started it and it is extremely well written and it comes with an endorsement from David King.

But it’s also got to be seen in perspective, he was completely out of his mind. He wasn’t just terrified of jews and black people and especially “interbreeding”, but also cracked windows, fish

Thanks for that – fascinating stuff that I knew nothing about. I’ll google more when I have time later.

I quite like him but find a little Bill Bryson goes a long way. I must say though, I do enjoy a @simondbarnes beer shot.